How Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are eating the world

Benedict Evans from Andreessen Horowitz publishes his Mobile is eating the World slides a few times a year and this one is no less awesome. I consider Benedict to be one of the top analysts thinking about the impact the mobile ecosystem is having right now and what it holds for the future. This extends to how giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon think about hardware and software, and how these are spawning entire new industries like drones, robotics, cars, etc simply through the miniaturization of components and their resulting price drop through scale.

Lets look at his latest deck.

We’re halfway to connecting everyone

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

2.5bn of the 5bn mobile phones are smart phones. This means more people connected that have never been connected, with their primary and only experience being mobile. This aligns with Peter Diamandis’ challenge to think about what the world looks like when we have 3bn new minds coming online by 2020. The world is changing fast and who knows what innovation is buried out there in the non-connected world.

Moving from creation to deployment

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

The mobile winners are clear. We’re moving into a mass rollout phase that creates a stable platform allowing us to think about what we can build with this commodity technology deployed to billions of users. This drives more rapid innovation at speed. eCommerce and cars look to be the biggest winners — or losers, if that’s what you currently do in the traditional way.

Introducing GAFA

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

The Big Four have massive scale relative the old Gorilla, Wintel. This has created $34bn investment since 2000. These four companies have scale to impact economies, not just technology, but the good news is that these are 4 competing giants driving each other, and innovation, forward at pace.

Apple is a Global Top 10 Retailer

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

This really surprised me. Apple is the 10th largest GLOBAL retailer by revenue.

Machine Learning comes of age

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

With this scale comes data, new customised hardware and rapid innovation as these giants compete. By shifting from rules engines to data learning, we’ll soon have very accurate answers to these questions:

Very real and very now. An example is Google using the machine learning platform that won Go and applying it to data center cooling. This resulted in a 15% energy saving. Imagine that at Google scale.

The Facebook walled Garden. Facebook IS the internet

Facebook is now the largest mobile web browser. This matters because 60% of all time spent online is on mobile. It’s also a walled garden keeping competitors out, so it’s worth thinking about.

Frictionless Computing

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

What happens when the mobile is no longer the primary device to get stuff done?

As we move to voice, spectacles, augmented reality and other ways to get our work and lives done, existing, even new app based business models start getting disrupted. Are you ready for this? And when this happens, who owns the customer?

Retailers are Newspapers

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

This is clearly happening right now, the question for the winner in online retail is:

How do people know what to buy?

Physical retailers are currently an offline discovery engine via the ‘shopping experience’. Once the internet figures out how to solve this, retail as we know it will decline rapidly. $1Tr is spent on digital demand generation right now. This is why Amazon Prime, The Amazon Echo, Dash buttons and similar are changing HOW things are bought. This then changes what is bought. Think Amazon Dash delivering Soap as a Service via Amazon fulfillment.

The Holy Grail of the ‘Shopping Experience is answering the question: “What would I like that I’ve never seen?”

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

The prize is massive, making the target is clear

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

Unbundling Cars

Source: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/12/8/mobile-is-eating-the-world

Cars will be unbundled as they move to electric with 10x fewer moving parts, simple, commodity batteries and motors and value moving to software. Data becomes the strategic competitive lever. What do Toyota, GM, Mazda look like when this happens? I suspect the next Google competitor will be Toyota or similar, not a tech company.

Are you ready?

This is all happening right now. Are you ready for the impact on your business and industry? The disruption involved, and fortunes to be protected and made are all creating more questions than answers right now. The innovators understand that this is inevitable, so think about what the opportunities are for you.

Thanks to Benedict Evans and Andreessen Horowitz for investing the time in helping us think about and challenge the world around us.

I encourage you to spend 30 minutes watching the video version narrated by Benedict.

☞ Please tap or click “♥︎” to recommend this article to others.